Condemn the brutal police attack on Pro-Palestinian youth!

Saturday, March 21st, at a demonstration marking the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war, I witnessed an outrageous attack by San Francisco police against protesters. Just four days after the SFPD violently attacked a march in support of Tristan Anderson – the activist from Oakland who was critically injured by Israeli Defense Forces while protesting the apartheid wall in Palestine – we saw the SFPD brutalize protesters again. This time they targeted Arab and Palestinian youth who had been standing up in the face of pro-war Zionists who came to counter-protest the 6th anniversary of the war demonstration. First the police grabbed an eight year old boy who supposedly had rocks in his pockets, and then they attacked dozens of pro-Palestinian youth, arresting five, injuring many, and sending at least one to the hospital. Here’s how one young woman described it:

“I then saw a team of officers snatch the boy out of the young woman’s arms dropping her and another young woman immediately to the floor using batons and excessive force. As the crowd of young Arab Americans stared on, an immediate sense of shock and urgency emerged in which members of the crowd tried to cross the barrier to pick up the two women off the floor and protect the young screaming child. As I ran in shock toward the child a police officer slammed the barrier with his baton about an inch away from my elbow. I then stared shocked and put my hands up as he jammed his baton across my mid section dropping me to the ground. From the ground I looked up only to find another officer slamming his baton onto the previously broken arm of an Arab American boy… The police officers pushed the barriers hard and fast, jamming them into the stomachs of the youth at the front lines.”

I personally saw police swinging their batons with full force, including on people who were already on the ground. One young woman ended up with a golf ball sized bump on her forehead. As all this was going on the crowd began to shout, “Oscar Grant! Oscar Grant!” “Just like Oakland!” “We are all Oscar Grant.” Youth from the Bay Area Revolution Club told people about the “People’s Tribunal on the murder of Oscar Grant and the nationwide epidemic of police brutality” happening the next day in Oakland. The question of the state – the military, the police, the prison system, their monopoly of armed force, and the way they use it to beat people down and oppress them from Iraq and Gaza to Oakland and San Francisco – was becoming real to people.

Less than an hour later, as the official rally ended, police chased down some people in the nearby BART station and arrested five more pro-Palestinian youth, using the excuse of an alleged “confrontation” with some pro-Israel Zionists. As it turns out, the pro-Israel people had pepper sprayed the youth and, as witnesses on the scene told me, had been calling the youth “A-rabs” and telling them to “go back where you came from.”

This is political repression and this shit cannot be tolerated!

At a time when the vast majority of this country was drunk on Barack Obama, how important was it that these youth came out into the streets to call out the U.S. sponsored Israeli massacre in Gaza for what it was?

At a time when Obama’s “new direction” is revealing itself more and more to be just a “new face” – as he sends 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, continues Bush’s secret renditions, and pledges to maintain tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for decades – how precious is it that these youth came out into the streets on the 6th anniversary of this unjust and illegal war to say “no more!”

At a time when many are starting to question “change you can believe in” but haven’t yet broken out of the framework of “waiting and seeing,” how important is it that these youth and others be out in the streets impatiently speaking the truth and building resistance?

THIS is what the system is afraid of. And this is what they want to silence before it spreads to all those who right now are standing on the sidelines. These outbreaks of resistance – against all these outrages, from the massacre in Gaza to the murder of Oscar Grant – are like sparks that need to be fanned, not stamped out!

Rafael, The World Can’t Wait
offthechainradio [at] hotmail.com

DROP ALL THE CHARGES ON ALL THE PROTESTERS! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN! NO WAR ON PAKISTAN, IRAN, GAZA! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!